400,000 Websites Vulnerable Through Exposed .git Directories

Open .git directories are a bigger cybersecurity problem than many might imagine, at least according to a Czech security researcher who

discovered almost 400,000 web pages with an open .git directory

possibly exposing a wide variety of data. From a report:

Vladimir Smitka began his .git directory odyssey in July when he began looking at Czech websites to find how many were improperly configured and allow access to their .git folders within the file versions repository. Open .git directories are a particularly dangerous issue, he said, because they can contain a great deal of sensitive information. “Information about the website’s structure, and sometimes you can get very sensitive data such as database passwords, API keys, development IDE settings, and so on. However, this data shouldn’t be stored in the repository, but in previous scans of various security issues, I have found many developers that do not follow these best practices,” Smitka wrote. Smitka queried 230 million websites to discover the 390,000 allowing access to their .git directories. The vast majority of the websites with open directories had a .com TLD with .net, .de, .org and uk comprising most of the others.